No More Heroes

Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

Lydia R. Cooper

Publication Year: 2011

Critics often trace the prevailing mood of despair and purported nihilism in the works of Cormac McCarthy to the striking absence of interior thought in his seemingly amoral characters. In No More Heroes, however, Lydia Cooper reveals that though McCarthy limits inner revelations, he never eliminates them entirely. In certain crucial cases, he endows his characters with ethical decisions and attitudes, revealing a strain of heroism exists in his otherwise violent and apocalyptic world.
Cooper evaluates all of McCarthy’s work to date, carefully exploring the range of his narrative techniques. The writer’s overwhelmingly distant, omniscient third-person narrative rarely shifts to a more limited voice. When it does deviate, however, revelations of his characters’ consciousness unmistakably exhibit moral awareness and ethical behavior. The quiet, internal struggles of moral men such as John Grady Cole in the Border Trilogy and the father in The Road demonstrate an imperfect but very human heroism.
Even when the writing moves into the minds of immoral characters, McCarthy draws attention to the characters’ humanity, forcing the perceptive reader to identify with even the most despicable representatives of the human race. Cooper shows that this rare yet powerful recognition of commonality and the internal yearnings for community and a commitment to justice or compassion undeniably exist in McCarthy’s work.
No More Heroes directly addresses the essential question about McCarthy’s brutal and morally ambiguous universe and reveals poignant new answers.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

In The Orchard Keeper (1965), jailed bootlegger Marion Sylder criticizes
the idealistic fervor of young John Wesley Rattner. “[Y]ou want to be
some kind of goddamned hero,” he tells the boy. “Well, I’ll tell ye, they
ain’t no more heroes” (214). In general, Cormac McCarthy’s bleak
literary worlds, scarred by grotesque images of human squalor and depravity,
lend credence to the bootlegger’s claim. But despite the “nihilistic...

01 "Word and Flesh" Narrative and Morality in the Early Appalachian Novels

At the end of Outer Dark (1968), Culla Holme meets a blind prophet
figure who tells him, “It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh” (240).
The blind man’s enigmatic assertion reflects the tension that runs
through McCarthy’s fiction, a tension between competing views
on the meaningfulness of life expressed through their rejection of
language as a means of effecting empathetic connection. In...

02 "A Dream of Shriving" Empathy and the Aesthetics of Convession in Suttree and Blood Meridian

Near the beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s semiautobiographical
novel Suttree (1979), the eponymous Cornelius Suttree, a failed
father and an absconded scion of a Knoxville lawyer, gets drunk
at a bar and, after proclaiming to a nearby wall, “I’m an asshole,”
collapses to the floor, where “[a] dream of shriving c[omes] to him”
(77, 78). In other words, following a rather tepid confession of sin—that...

03 "Pledged in Blood" Linguistic Interiority and Redemption in the Border Trilogy

In one of the opening scenes of All the Pretty Horses (1992), John Grady
Cole walks out into the night and remembers “a dream of the past” in
which a band of American Indian warriors rode down from the north,
“all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only” (5). By the
end of the novel, John Grady has killed and seen killing and is himself
“pledged in blood.” Like Blood Meridian (1985), McCarthy’s earlier western...

04 "He's a Psychopathic Killer But So What?" Moral Storytelling in No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005) tells the story of a sheriff struggling
along in the bloody wake of a psychopathic murderer. This novel
is narrated primarily in the omniscient third-person style that typifies
McCarthy’s darkest novels, such as Blood Meridian (1985); but
unlike Blood Meridian’s narrator, the third-person narrative voice
in No Country for Old Men is stripped of McCarthy’s characteristic convoluted...

05 "There Is No God and We Are His Prophets" Heroism and Prophetic Narrative in The Road

In The Road (2006), two nameless characters, a father and a son, travel
through a postapocalyptic world from the ruins of the father’s ancestral
home in eastern Tennessee down to what is likely an abandoned, darkly
futuristic Galveston, Texas. The Road symbolically bridges the geographical
divide between McCarthy’s earlier Appalachian novels (The Orchard
Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree) and his Texan novels...

Conclusion

In the account of his 1992 interview with McCarthy, Richard B. Woodward
describes Blood Meridian (1985) as “the bloodiest book since The
Iliad.” He points out, though, that in contrast to The Iliad, “[t]here are
no heroes in this vision of the American frontier” (7). There are no
traditional heroes anywhere in McCarthy’s corpus. Even “all-american
cowboys” such as John Grady Cole betray cousins, defile virgins, and kill...

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